How big is too big?

shaihalud

So the other day I checked out my game's contents, and the xml file for the main player character is currently riding 66kb. I'm just wondering, is this going to pose too much of a problem for the game loading time? If you figure that a scene will have one main character, which is 66kb, a few high AI enemies (25k), and about 10 other actors of low memory (8k or less), graphics (which are quite small actually), and then music- should I try to keep the size of the scene down to a certain kilobytage? I don't recall seeing anything written about it-I know that a lot of actors are bad news, which is why I'm trying to keep each scene down to around 16 or 18 (which is still pretty big, but hey). Trying to make the game first before getting a license, so can't try it out yet. Any comments?

rebump

Best to test it on a device and then tweak/re-do and/or remove features to accomodate. Testing on the older iPhones and iPod Touches is a good way to ensure decent performance.

You could also, until GS adds a feature to detect device, add a menu item for device selection and then scale accordingly.

For performance tweaks, just read stuff on the forums and learn as you go (i.e. destroy/re-spawn is more intense than move off screen/re-use, spawning too many things en masse slows things to a halt sometimes, too many rules per actor can slow down performance, re-think your logic/rules to try an optimize, etc.).